In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Latin America—from Mexico, through the Caribbean, and into Central and South America—despite my efforts, remains a difficult research terrain. There’s more yodeling here than meets the ear, essentially having existed, entertained , and reverberated across this region for centuries. The fame of Colombia-born Shakira with her natural voice-break adding extra embellishment to an already rich voice has not really helped matters. Although, as I’ve noted, despite what serious music lovers may think of Shakira, she is a yodeler—she may not even be aware of it!—and a talented one at that. In her case, it’s genetic. Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll (–) is a singer of Colombian, Lebanese, Catalan, and Italian descent who manages to be very pop, while maintaining an impressive repertoire that covers rock, Latin, and Middle Eastern influences sung in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Bonnie, a Latinaphile friend, gave us her early Pies Descalzos () as a going-away present, upon our departure from Brooklyn to Amsterdam. I listened once and dismissed it as Latin Madonna fluff. Later, while writing Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo, I rediscovered something else going on—a rich, intrepid aspect to her vocals that seemed full of natural effects, sparkle, twists, birds, howls, breathing, and vocal clicks that sounded a lot like yodels. By that time she was more famous than Jesus, Madonna, and Maradona put together. Her voice clearly yodels, like Dolores O’Riordan’s, breaking as naturally as waves upon a shore. Nothing she can do about it except use it. Her official  Olympic song, “Waka Waka” (which jump-starts with an almost preternatural gritoyodel ),1 has been viewed umpteen hundred million times on YouTube. Her English language crossover, Laundry Service (Epic, ), sold fourteen million copies and exhibits her effortless voice-break yodeling on numerous tracks but most obviously on “Rules,” “Fool,” and “Poem to a Horse” and on her cumbiainspired “Hips Don’t Lie.” Cumbia, Colombia’s renowned percussion-driven musical export, based on a Guinean slave courting dance, features complex rhythms and syncopated melodies. Its seamier coastal version is embroidered with yodeling and reflects numerous influences—European, African, indigenous. The music was once considered lowbrow, for rednecks performed by itinerant musicians combining Spanish minstrel and African griots, who were themselves wandering African herders, singing the news of the day. This lowly status, of course, gave it room to maneuver creatively. Latin America—Ay Yaie Yaie EEEE OOOoo   THE LANDS OF YO Vallenato, the cumbia-related accordion-and-bass driven dance music, originated in northeastern Colombia ’s valleys, home to numerous indigenous yodel-like utterances, such as the grito. Colombia’s Yuko Motilon people of the Sierra de Perija have several corn harvest songs—kushatra—that include humming, falsetto, and yodeling.2 One dance song features whistling and infants crying while the women yodel. With its loping, horse-trot beat, vallenato mixes traditional Spanish minstrelsy with west African griot songs and comes in four styles or beats: son solemn notes; paseo, a variation on son and the most common; merengues, El Acordéon y Yodel del Diablo Alfredo Gutierrez (–) is a major vallenato star. Colombia’s Gutierrez forges a supple, ferocious fusion of vallenato, vibrant merengue, and more modern, salsain fluenced, loose-hipped cumbia rhythms laced with soulful, falsetto yodels that tear the heart out of your rib cage and stuffs it into his small German accordion where he further Cuisinarts it. In other words, raucous, tactile, humid, and tender. His emotional lyrics, roguish manner, and dramatic delivery, further enhanced by his soaring, strafing yodels—his cantar modulando la voz rápidamente desde el tono natural al falsete y vice versa—create a tense-urban atmosphere as only Brel and Piaf could. His “El Diario de un Borracho” offers the tears-in-my beer poignancy of the best chansons or blues: a man down on his luck drowns his sorrowful loneliness in drink to obliterate memories of womanly betrayal. I discovered Gutierrez, among others, only after YodelAy -Ee-Oooo was published, and the discovery further lured unheralded yodelers into my midst. But Gutierrez, as email correspondent and yodeler Jeremy Rothbaum pointed out, is anything but obscure in Latin America. Rothbaum discovered Alfredo Gutierrez while living in Bogota in the s and sent me a tape of early Gutierrez. I’ve been smitten with him ever since. Gutierrez learned accordion at home as a kid. By age six he was already performing on the streets with...

Share